Hi there! Welcome!

My name is Kristin and I’m a trust coach. I write, speak, teach, make art, and listen deeply, all to help trust grow.

Trust Tending is my virtual greenhouse for this work of tending trust.

Trust, as it’s used in this space, is a type of softening.

It’s a softening into who and what and where we are right now….and now….and now – including our darkest and most depressing experiences, as well as those bursting with light. And yes, it’s softening into the in between experiences, too!

It’s learning to unclench our fists from around a certain version of life or health we wish for ourselves or our dear ones; from around the way we’re sure things ought to be; from around the stories we keep telling from the past or present…and finding a deeper, more enlivening source of strength to face the road ahead.

It’s taking what feel like small, and sometimes large risks to live as though the universe is kind, and to carry the parts of us that fear that the universe isn’t with compassion and humility, knowing none of us knows fully the nature of everything.

I work with and for and arm-in-arm with people like you:

• People who want to do more than just cope through life. People who want to THRIVE.
• People who want to wake up, again and again, and in deepening ways, to what’s real.
• People who sense that fear is a charade, and who continue to recognize its power in their lives.
• People who want increasing freedom from the trappings of their ego.
• People who want to feel safe somewhere, most especially in their own skin.
• People who want to shape our world with kind, clear-sighted power, and who recognize this type of power must be cultivated – that for ALL of us, it’s a practice.

My Story

Though my formal training is in art (H.S.), International Studies (B.A.), and Theology (two M.A.’s), my path to tending trust was orchestrated by a series of disorienting “hatchings”.

The most painful one began in my early 20s, when the religious faith of my childhood began to unravel. I had been deeply devout, and the unraveling was just as deeply unwelcome – processed with more books, more prayer and meditation, more conversations with mentors and friends and two related Master’s degrees than even I could have wished for.

But there it was: my most integrous path, opening up and out before me. I felt like a brand new bird, blinking in the brightness and disorienting vastness of a new world.

That hatching propelled me into a season of therapy and introspection that nurtured further hatchings – further experiences of feeling the stories I’d told about my life and other people becoming too small, then cracking, then opening out into much different views. The hatchings widened to include things like vocational identity (minister, then professor, then writer, then coach) and the question of whether to have kids (I now have two, ages 5 and 7; I’m 37).

I’ve come to see this cycle of hatching-growing-hatching as the way of things – the way of the awakening life: an ongoing process of getting comfortable with a certain set of circumstances or stories and then reaching points where these must open up and out or risk stifling the growth our minds and spirits pulse to do.

Which is where trust comes in.

Hatching is rarely comfortable. And whether applied to the inner life, or to changes in outer circumstances (jobs, relationships, aging, health), most of us fear and resist it. Our animal instincts are deeply programmed for predictability and stasis…neither of which mark the awakening life (or really any life!).

Trust tending has become the ongoing practice, for me, of unlearning instinctual and life-stifling fear – fear that wants to slow and even stall important hatchings – and learning and re-learning, again and again, how to soften and surrender into life-as-it-is.

As I tend trust and fear loses its grip on my world:

• My courage expands and I find myself more and more willing to take, rather than stall out on, my life’s next steps.
• My resilience increases, and I much more quickly stand up after mistakes I make and setbacks I encounter, brush myself off, and continue on my way.
• I find myself more and more often in a state of flow, where I’m acting and reacting not as an ego, with the drive to self-protect, but as a soul that’s un-self-conscious, operating with all the suppleness, power, and ease that marks life beyond fear.

It’s my great honor and deep joy to share this practice with you!

Navigating this site

• By far, readers report Trust Notes as their favorite piece of what happens here. Those might be the place you’d like to start, too.
• I post on the blog here once or twice each week, almost always with accompanying sketches.
• Trust Habits, my 30-day trust-fundamentals course, begins again April 15. Sign up for Trust Notes to receive word when registration opens.
• If you’re interested in a more personal connection, I offer Deep Listening sessions, which you can read about here.
• I’m currently readying my store for a grand re-opening with trust nourishing cards, prints, journals, and more. If you’d like to be notified when the doors re-open and receive coupons for purchases, sign up for Trust Notes in the sidebar.
• And I use Facebook and Twitter to share trust-related articles and thoughts beyond the blog. Trust Tending is on Facebook here, and on Twitter here. I’d love to connect with you!

Questions?

I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line at kristin t noelle at gmail dot com, or click here to use a built-in contact form.

I’m so glad you stopped by and whole-heartedly wish you well!

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